BERLIN— The primary requests from speakers to the Worcester County Commissioners was to keep polling locations convenient for voters reassigned to a different voting district at the third and better-attended public hearing on proposed redistricting plans for the 2014 elections on Aug. 1.

Despite a summertime deluge, Commissioners President Bud Church remarked that the hearing at Stephen Decatur Middle School was “the best attended of the three” and assured rain-soaked speakers that the commissioners would give their comments serious consideration. He predicted the commissioners would come up with a mutually agreed upon plan.

Previous hearings were held in Snow Hill and Pocomoke to nearly empty rooms.

The need for redistricting was prompted by significant population growth in Berlin and West Ocean City that was reported in the 2010 census. The plan aims to get each of the county’s seven voting districts as close to a uniform population of 7,364 as possible, while retaining mandated minority majority representation in the Sinepuxent District (District 2).

Mayor Gee Williams spoke on behalf of the Berlin Town Council of Berlin, which would be trisected under the plan, instead of remaining in its current two-district configuration. He said town leaders supported the proposed redistricting of county voting districts, provided that the county could find the funding needed to provide a convenient polling place for Berlin voters who will be re-designated to the county’s Western District.  

Noting that under the proposal a polling place at the Stockton Fire Department would no longer be needed, Williams requested that the commissioners consider transferring the voting machines and election judges from the Stockton site to Berlin to accommodate its reassigned voters. He suggested that such a change would result in little additional cost to the County Board of Elections.

Williams suggested that Berlin Intermediate School could serve as an adequate polling place for Berlin’s Western District voters, even as it continued to also serve as the assigned voting place for the Sinepuxent District. “The school on Franklin Avenue has proved to be both easily accessible and have adequate parking on even the busiest Election Day,” he said.

Williams proposed that the Board of Elections consider using the school’s cafeteria, as it has in the past, for the Sinepuxent District and the gymnasium for the Western District. “The gym was used in the past as a county polling place and has shown it is a practical location with controlled access for the purpose of voting,” he said.

Williams also requested a slight tweaking of the proposed dividing line between the Western and Sinepuxent districts that would move it eastward from Harrison Avenue to a line that would align immediately adjacent to Main Street. The modification, he said, “would make the division between the two districts become the actual roadway of Harrison Avenue, with residents to the west of Harrison Avenue assigned to the Western District, and voters located east of Harrison Avenue remain in the Sinepuxent District.”

Tom Terry, president of the Ocean Pines Association, asked the commissioners for a more central polling place in Ocean Pines and within District 5, which represents the Ocean Pines community. While there are three polling locations for the 8,447 homeowners in the Ocean Pines community, only one is within the community boundaries, the Community Center Assateague Room.

And that polling location is technically located in District 6, but assigned to District 5, Worcester County Election Director Patricia Jackson said afterward. The two District 5 locations are the Ocean Pines Library on Cathell Road and the Community Church at Ocean Pines on Racetrack Road.

Commissioner Judy Boggs, who represents Ocean Pines, said she wanted to keep the locations as near and convenient to voters as possible. She does not want to create inconvenient conditions that could turn voters away, she said, but polling location assignments were done exclusively by the county’s Board of Elections.

Jackson said budget constraints might be an issue and the board is awaiting a response from state officials before deciding how to proceed.

Boggs acknowledged that the elections board had a difficult task in deciding how or whether to relocate polling place assignments. “The next difficult situation is educating everybody” after the decisions have been made, she said.

The request made by Howard Sribnick of the Democratic Central Committee for Worcester County was similar to Williams’. By extending District 2 to maintain a plurality of ethnic minority representation, the proposed redistricting could inadvertently create a logistical problem for some of those voters, he said.

As proposed, the plan could create a situation where voters in the southernmost parts of the district have to travel a considerable distance to vote, he said.

“We are concerned that this might result in fewer citizens in that portion of the district participating in the voting process,” Sribnick said. “Addressing this issue may require that increased resources be provided to the Board of Elections for the establishment of additional polling places.”

Tom Dorman, former principal of Berlin Middle School, had a different concern. He warned against splitting Berlin into a three districts. The redistricting proposal could dilute the political power that a more dense concentration of voters-to-elected-official ratio would mean for Berlin in the future.

“If one person calls you, it may not be a problem,” he said, apparently meaning that it might not spur a politician to act in response compared to their overall constituent base. But, “if 100 people call you, it usually gets your attention,” Dorman said.